It's learning me?
Absurd as this notion was, the scene that unfolded next before his eyes seemed to be bearing out Mo Fan's conjecture bit by bit.
Those two huge blood-red eyeballs hovering in midair were gradually undergoing a mutation that made his scalp crawl.
The eyeball on the left suddenly let out a teeth-grating squelch, its surface beginning to sprout dark red flesh buds at a frantic rate.
Those flesh buds interwove and coiled around one another.
Astonishingly, with this eyeball as the core, they swelled outward sharply, forcing out the outline of a huge, deformed "head"!
As for the eyeball on the right...
Pop!
It burst open without warning!
But it didn't turn into blood. Instead, it exploded into countless thick strands of dark red flesh.
These flesh threads, like living blood vessels, instantly plunged into the vast snakeskin below, which was contracting violently.
Rrrip... rrrip...
Under the flesh threads' frantic pulling and stitching, the huge snakeskin began to twist violently.
Two lumps of flesh bulged up from the snakeskin beneath the "head," barely forming something resembling shoulders.
And then...
The snakeskin on either side was crudely squeezed outward, like toothpaste from a tube...
Forcing two long, strip-shaped limbs out from within the husk.
Meanwhile, the snake molt's long tail split down the middle with a rrrip, forming two separate sections.
Along with the clammy, muffled groan of bone and flesh grinding within...
They were forcibly folded into two legs, propping it up from the ground.
In the span of just a few short minutes...
A "man," forcibly cobbled together from snakeskin, corpse remains, flesh threads, and eyeballs, stood there before Mo Fan, drenched in blood!
Except...
Its proportions were eerie to the utmost extreme.
The head was fully the size of a water vat.
Its two arms were so long they nearly dragged along the ground, while the two legs formed from the split snake tail were both short and thick.
The entire body carried an extreme sense of discordant deformity. Like a demon that had crawled up out of the abyss.
Looking at this eerie thing before him, motionless and radiating a thick reek of blood...
Mo Fan, on the contrary, no longer felt his initial fear.
In its place was an irrepressible curiosity.
This thing... Just what the hell is it?
Hiding behind Unit 004's vast bone shield, Mo Fan poked half his head out and stared fixedly at the other party.
That monster still made no move to attack whatsoever.
It simply stood there, dragging its long arms, using that disproportionately huge head to "look" straight at him.
Utterly motionless.
"..."
Man and monster once again fell into an eerie silence.
Mo Fan narrowed his eyes. A probing notion suddenly popped into his mind.
Slowly, from behind Unit 004, he raised his left hand.
The deformed monster opposite him paused for two or three seconds.
It was as if that water vat-sized head were struggling to process the action before it.
Creak...
Along with the muffled groan of bone and flesh forcibly wrenching around... It too raised the left arm dragging along the ground, exceedingly stiffly.
Mo Fan cocked an eyebrow and took an experimental step to the left.
The monster paused for another two seconds. Then its two short, thick legs awkwardly crossed over one another, and it too shuffled a step to the left.
Mo Fan slowly crouched down.
The monster followed suit. But because its legs were too short and its arms too long, the crouching posture was exceedingly comical.
Its center of gravity became unstable, and its vast body wobbled, nearly pitching headfirst to the ground.
Mo Fan abruptly stood up and switched to raising his right hand.
The monster was half a beat slow. Its left arm, already halfway raised, froze in midair before quickly dropping as it switched to raising its right arm.
Watching this scene, the corner of Mo Fan's eye twitched a couple of times.
He drew a deep breath.
With a touch of malicious glee and a touch of curiosity toward the unknown, he arrogantly flipped the monster the middle finger.
The monster's huge head tilted slightly. It seemed to stare at that middle finger for a good while, trying to comprehend the structure of the gesture.
A full five seconds passed.
Its coarse, huge claw, which had only three long strips of flesh for fingers, slowly curled into a fist.
Then... Along with a wriggling of flesh buds...
An exceedingly disproportionate, thick middle finger, covered all over in dark red fleshy growths...
Slowly and earnestly rose into the air.
Looking at that huge middle finger, thicker than his own arm, Mo Fan actually felt somewhat inferior for a moment.
"Yer mother."
However...
No sooner had Mo Fan finished grumbling than he discovered something astonishing.
As the number of imitations increased, this monster's "learning ability" was improving at an exceedingly obvious rate!
At first... It had needed a delay of two or three seconds to imitate a single action of Mo Fan's.
But gradually... It needed only one second.
By the end, when Mo Fan tried swinging his arm, it performed the exact same action at almost the exact same moment.
Not a hair off. It was like a mirror standing before Mo Fan.
Except... This mirror was cobbled together from snakeskin and gore.
And what was even more hair-raising...
In the process of synchronizing its movements, it was also continuously correcting the grotesque proportions of its own body.
Crack, crack, crack...
With each of Mo Fan's movements, the snake molt and flesh covering its body would wriggle and recombine anew, like boiling water.
The two arms dragging along the ground shortened bit by bit as the flesh buds devoured and reshaped them.
The broad, bloated shoulders slowly contracted inward.
Its originally hunched spine let out crisp cracks like popping beans, straightening one vertebra at a time.
Meanwhile, the two short, thick snakeskin legs lengthened and reshaped ceaselessly...
Gradually approaching the proportions of normal human legs.
Even...
That enormous water vat-sized head began to collapse inward and shrink bit by bit.
Fresh flesh growing ceaselessly around it gradually wrapped the huge blood-red eyeball, once exposed on the outside, deeper and deeper within.
Seeing this...
The trace of malicious glee still lingering on Mo Fan's face finally vanished bit by bit.
This isn't right...
He suddenly realized something.
Every single action he'd made just now... Seemed to be teaching this thing... How to move like a person.
Mo Fan immediately stopped probing further.
At the same time, he once again commanded the undead legion to attack!
Mo Yan turned into a black shadow, the cold-iron longsword in its hands hacking madly against the monster's back.
The longsword couldn't truly cut through those dark red scales formed from the Golden Core snake molt...
But it could slash away great swaths of the rotten flesh that had later filled in the outer layer!
Unit 004 crashed thunderously into its waist.
And the distant WTF fired [ Death Missile ] after [ Death Missile ], raining them down upon it!
Flames soared skyward. Gore flew everywhere!
But... This monster seemed not to know the meaning of pain at all.
No matter how much of its newborn flesh was blasted away, dark red flesh buds would bore out from within the snake molt almost instantly, restitching and filling in the damaged areas.
It didn't budge from where it stood. It didn't even turn its head once.
It utterly ignored those attacks, attacks powerful enough to tear an ordinary Foundation Establishment cultivator to shreds.
That face, gradually taking shape, remained firmly locked on Mo Fan.
It was still watching. Still learning.
This thing... Just what does it want to do?
Mo Fan sucked in a cold breath and once again activated his [ Death Vision ].
Hummm...
When Mo Fan once again saw clearly the state of the soul inside the monster, his heart clenched violently!
If the cluster of souls once hidden inside the snake molt had been like a storm forcibly kneaded together from countless shattered remnant souls...
Chaotic. Disordered. Flickering bright and dim.
Then now...
As it continued imitating Mo Fan's outward form, that chaotic cluster of soul fluctuations was astonishingly beginning to change bit by bit!
It hadn't suddenly become Mo Fan's soul.
But those countless remnant souls, once utterly entangled together, were gradually becoming stable. Orderly.
There was even, faintly, the beginning of something resembling a human soul-fire.
Cold sweat instantly broke out across Mo Fan's back.
But before he could make his next move...
That monster had already begun... To "make a face."
As its build continued correcting itself, those mutated demon beast corpses on the nearby ground, already withered dry...
Were once more seized by the flesh threads extending from within its body.
Then they were forcibly dragged over.
The last scraps of flesh and blood remaining in those carcasses were crudely broken down and put to use, filling in the surface of the head formed from snakeskin bit by bit.
First, a lump of flesh slowly bulged upward. It became the bridge of a nose.
Then came the slit of a mouth. Next, the flesh of the cheeks.
Except... The initial shaping was exceedingly crude. Downright ghastly to behold.
One eye higher, one eye lower. The mouth skewed all the way toward the edge of the chin. The positions of almost all its features were wrong.
Mo Fan looked at that face. It was like looking at a version of himself crudely cobbled together from shoddy lumps of flesh.
But this distortion didn't last long.
As those eyes, gradually hidden beneath the flesh, continued staring at Mo Fan... The flesh on its face began to wriggle bit by bit.
It was as if countless unseen hands beneath the skin were ceaselessly kneading and adjusting it.
The dislocated nose slowly shifted back toward the center. The crooked corners of the mouth leveled out bit by bit. The broad chin gradually contracted inward.
Even the coarse snakeskin of the outer layer began to grow smooth and taut.
Bit by bit... It imitated the texture of human skin.
One minute later.
Mo Fan's breathing stopped for an instant.
Standing before him was no longer the flesh monster of twisted proportions from moments ago.
But a "man" who, in build, proportions, and even features, bore a seventy to eighty percent resemblance to him.
A "man."
Aside from its skin still carrying a dead, dark red hue... It was practically another Mo Fan.
Mo Fan stared at that increasingly familiar face. An indescribable sense of horror slowly crept into his heart.
He subconsciously frowned.
The "Mo Fan" opposite him... Also, without the slightest delay, slowly furrowed those eyebrows cobbled together from snakeskin and gore.
Perfectly synchronized. Like a mirror image.
However...
At the very instant Mo Fan was about to step backward and widen the distance between them...
On the face of that "Mo Fan" opposite him, which by all rights should have remained tense along with Mo Fan...
The corner of its mouth... Suddenly... Slowly curled upward.
The two stiff lips of flesh gradually split apart to either side. The muscles of its face, seemingly not yet familiar with this expression, twitched slightly and unnaturally.
At last...
Upon that face bearing a seventy to eighty percent resemblance to Mo Fan... There bloomed an exceedingly stiff, twisted... Smile.
But Mo Fan,
at this moment...
Was not smiling.